ACC announces complicated tiebreaker rules to determine league championship opponents

On3-Social-Profile_GRAYby:On3 Staff Report•05/17/23

When the ACC made the decision to drop divisions for the 2023 football game it needed a new format for determining who would play in the annual ACC Championship Game, with a set of ACC tiebreaker rules in the event multiple schools finished with the same record.

On Wednesday, the conference revealed those rules.

The two teams that play for the ACC Championship Game will be the two teams in the conference with the highest winning percentage during all regular-season conference play.

To that end, the ACC has tiebreaker rules for ties between two or more schools.

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Those ACC tiebreaker rules are as follows:

Two-Team Tie

  1. Head-to-head competition between the two tied teams.
  2. Win percentage versus all common opponents.
  3. Win percentage versus common opponents based upon their order of finish (overall conference win percentage, with ties broken) and proceeding through other common opponents based upon their order of finish.
  4. Combined win percentage of conference opponents.
  5. The tied team with the higher ranking by the Team Rating Score metric provided by SportSource Analytics following the conclusion of regular season games.
  6. The representative shall be chosen by a draw as administered by the Commissioner or Commissioner’s designee.

Three (or More) Team Tie

Three team (or more) tiebreaker procedure will first be used to identify one Championship Game representative. Once that team is determined, the tiebreaker procedures restart for the remaining tied teams.

  1. Combined head-to-head win percentage among the tied teams if all tied teams are common opponents.
  2. If all the tied teams are not common opponents, the tied team that defeated each of the other tied teams.
  3. Win percentage versus all common opponents.
  4. Win percentage versus common opponents based on their order of finish (overall conference win percentage, with ties broken) and proceeding through other common opponents based upon their order of finish.
  5. Combined win percentage of conference opponents.
  6. The tied team with the higher ranking by the Team Rating Score metric provided by SportSource Analytics following the conclusion of regular season games.
  7. The representative shall be chosen by a draw as administered by the Commissioner or Commissioner’s designee.
  • Note: Conference games against otherwise post-season ineligible teams will always be counted in the league standings and in application of the tiebreaker procedures.